Digital sensemaking is sensemaking mediated by a digital information infrastructure, such as the Worldwide Web (“Web”). Through the Web, users can access both “traditional” Web sites that post information from diverse sources and interactive Web sites, including moderated Web logs or “blogs,” user forums, and Web sites with voting, which allow users to actively rank new information.
As a digital information repository, the Web continually evolves as events occur, ideas get synthesized, and new trends emerge. New information is posted continuously. Information awareness, though, remains artificially constrained. Mainstream media Web sites generally only cover popular topics, such as news, business, politics, sports, entertainment, and weather, but a host of additional topics exist through other Web sources, which may fall outside the scope of a reader's, or publisher's, core set of interests. These topics range from slightly less popular topics, for instance, technology news, to specialized or obscure topics that are relevant to a comparatively small number of people, such as evening class schedules for a local community college.
The demand for items in many markets follows a “Long Tail” distribution, such as described in C. Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, (Hyperion Press) (2006), the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference. FIG. 1 is a graph showing, by way of example, a hypothetical long tail distribution 10 for digital information. The x-axis represents digital information and the y-axis represents popularity level. Items appearing at the head of the distribution 11, although few in number, enjoy the greatest popularity, such as media stories falling into a small number of popular categories. However, items along the “long tail” 12, which cover niche topics with smaller readerships, outnumber head items 11. Although any single head item 11 enjoys greater popularity than any one of the long tail items 12, the aggregate popularity of a large enough group of long tail items 12 will exceed the popularity of all head items 11 when enough long tail items 12 are included, which implies that a larger overall audience could be reached by focusing on long tail topics, provided the audience can be made aware of them.
Consumers of information have only a limited amount of time and cannot pay attention to everything. As more topics become available, mainstream topics receive a shrinking fraction of readers' attention. Analogously, prime time television audiences are currently shrinking, as cable and satellite networks improve their programming and increase their viewership. Similarly, musical “hits” today sell fewer copies than sold a decade ago, as more choices and purchasing options become available. The economics and popularity trends from these observations can be succinctly summarized: “if you give people choices, they take them” and “the head of the distribution is shrinking.”
The problem is not only finding new or popular information: the problem is finding new information falling outside areas of core topical interests that nevertheless remain relevant while simultaneously pushing the envelope. Myopia sets in easily and focusing on only familiar and known topics risks missing new ideas or emerging trends. The amount of information on the “frontier” of a reader's core set of topics is larger than the body of information in main focus. Moreover, fringe topics are generally less important to the reader than the core topics, and are thus more easily overlooked.
Topics that will become important to readers often make their first appearance just beyond the boundaries of their familiar core topics. Monitoring topics on this fringe can give “beyond the radar” awareness of what's coming, potentially saving the expense of late remedies if attention is paid to the information much later. Efficiently finding relevant frontier information, though, can be a challenge, as the level of expertise is inherently lower than possessed for identifying core topical information. This problem is exacerbated by an incomplete understanding of the frontier information topics structure and a lack of awareness in identifying good sources of frontier information.
Therefore, a need remains in digital sensemaking for efficiently prospecting new, relevant, and authoritative digital information lying beyond the core topics for a specific subject area.